PROFILE: RICHARD GREEVER

Richard Greever. That's his website, TokenCatalog.com, on the computer monitor.

I was recently researching an obscure topic and stumbled across something interesting in my Google search results: a website called TokenCatalog.com, which attempts to document the seemingly limitless world of tokens.

Nowadays, of course, the term "token" often refers to the digital world — crypto tokens, AI tokens, security tokens, that sort of thing. But TokenCatalog.com is about physical tokens — coin-like items that can be used in lieu of cash. Some are issued by private businesses (a "Good for One Drink" chit at a local bar, or scrip to be used at the company store), others by governmental agencies (subway tokens). TokenCatalog.com claims to have photos of over 600,000 of them.

I'd never much thought about tokens as collectibles until I came across the TokenCatalog.com site, but a quick check of eBay revealed that token collecting is definitely a thing. I wanted to know more, so I contacted the site's founder, Richard Greever, and asked if I could interview him. Here's the transcript of a Zoom call we recently had, edited for length and clarity.

Inconspicuous Consumption: Please tell me a little bit about yourself. How old are you, where do you live, and what do you do for a living?

Richard Greever: I'm 68 years old. I'm currently back in California, although I lived in Hawaii for the past 15 years or so. And I'm retired from a career as a software engineer — embedded systems, telecommunication systems for corporate systems, working on their software.

IC: Do you collect anything besides tokens?

Greever:: Not really. I collected coins as a kid, sort of lost interest in that over the years, and then started picking that up again. But then prices of everything went crazy and around 2000 or so, so my wife said, "You should try tokens. They're cheap."

IC: So that's when you got bitten by the token bug, so to speak?

Greever: Yeah. I bought a bunch of them from Fred Holabird, this well-known Western Americana dealer in Nevada. He had an auction and I said to him, "Can I buy all the unsold lots?" So I got about 150 tokens from Oregon. I knew nothing about them and they were all different. It was cool.

IC: So you started out with 150 tokens. How many do you have now?

Greever: Probably 10,000.

IC: Whoa! So your wife really didn't know what she was getting into there, right?

Greever: Yeah, she's scratching her head like, "That wasn't what was supposed to happen."

IC: Well, at least it's 10,000 of something that's fairly small. Speaking of which, how do you have them arranged or displayed or stored?

A portion of Greever's Oregon token collection

Greever: They're not really displayed except for on the website. The bulk of them are Oregon state tokens, because of that first group of them I got. That's how I collected coins as a kid — you fill up the penny book until you've filled in every hole. It took a long time for me to figure out that with tokens, you can't fill in every hole. You're never finished. There are always new ones turning up, being found.

I still focus on specific areas. I do Oregon, I do Hawaii trade tokens, and I did Santa Clara County in California. And I used to have a collection of California saloon tokens, but I sold that a bunch of years ago. Anyway, that's how I sort of organize things — by where they're from, by town and by state.

IC: When did you launch the website?

Greever: I think it was 2006. I'd been collecting for a number of years, and I was frustrated because I couldn't find any information about the tokens I had. Like, what is this design? How many were made? Here's one that has a big hole in the center — were they all that way, or was that a mistake?

So I created the website and started cataloging my collection as I acquired more tokens and adding whatever information I could about them.

IC: So your goal was to create the most comprehensive token library, database, catalog, whatever you want to call it, as possible?

Greever: My goal was to create a tool that would enable that to happen. When I started working on the website, I had several thousand Oregon tokens — I was just buying everything Oregon. And then I thought, oh, wouldn't it be cool if I entered all mine and you entered all yours and everybody entered all of theirs, then there would be this massive database. You'd see all different wear, different varieties.

And then, after spending a year of entering tokens onto the database as pretty much a full-time job, I realized nobody else in their right mind will ever do this. So it was never my intent to be the one to catalog everything. It was more to make a tool so others could do the same thing I was trying to do. And then what gets displayed to the public is a union of everything that's been put in.

IC: You just said no one else in their right mind would do this, but lots of people actually have done it. It has become a crowdsourced project, so to speak, right?

Greever: Yeah. There are definitely people who help research stuff on the site. There are certain personalities that I think are addicted to what I created — and I'm one of them! I mean, I'm on the site every day, playing around. What I'm trying to do is just find more information about what's already there. Ideally, I'd like to know who made every token, who the vendor was and when.

To read the complete article, see:
Collection Agency: A More Inconspicuous Coin Category (https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/collection-agency-a-more-inconspicuous)

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